And as ever, I'll re-iterate my belief that it would all be a lot easier if England elected to leave the United Kingdom if it wants to leave the EU.
Of course, what I'm really wondering is what the chances are of getting Scottish nationality in the event that things get even worse down here in Little England. It looks like I'll be stuck with fuckers like Johnson, Mogg and the Hugo Boss suited Raab as my rulers until I'm nearly sixty fucking nine years old and I'd like to be somewhere with a more humane care policy before fucking Sid legs it with all the NHS shares.
Incidentally, in true right-wing tradition, it seems like Gypsies and Travellers will be early targets of the benevolent Johnson administration with police powers to seize their vehicles and property (i.e. their homes) and intentional trespass becoming a criminal offence. That last proposal about trespass is an interesting one with even wider implications.
Oh my fucking god.
:-(( :-(( :-((
Watching Peter Snow on the tellybox this morning show us round the virtual House of Commons was a fairly depressing sight.
The left benches were full of blue, but the right was barely a quarter full of Labour's seats.
What's even more depressing is the crowd of current and ex Labour MPs like Alan Fucking Johnson who have spent the last four years doing nothing but lying, writing, speaking, briefing against and generally undermining Corbyn and the Labour leadership, now queuing up to say that they have no responsibility at all for the loss and it's all down to Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.
We don't elect our PMs like presidents. They get chosen by their party. But for years the media have worked to make it seem like a presidential race. That suits the right just fine. When all but a tiny part of the media are committed to support of right-wing candidates then I defy any left-wing "presidential" figure to still look presidential after 4 years of utter and total character assassination. And when the ruling party thinks fact-checking is a huge joke...
Sage words. I believe that Corbyn has stood still while other members have taken a step back to wherever they wash their hands, leaving him vulnerable and an easy scapegoat. Not that he didn't have a hand in the whole result. Standing on the Brexit fence and then throwing a whole host of manifesto pledges that promised everything to everyone at the last minute didn't do him any favours.
Given our dire need for people, reckon it'd be pretty much open borders on that front!
I don't think his brexit position was bad, but his presentation of it was awful. He need to go on the offensive with it from the off, and he didn't so it came over as weak.
I've met him a couple of times and he does seem like a genuinely lovely guy, but does rather lack the absolute killer streak that's (sadly) required to survive the front line.
You're quite right, it isn't the whole story. Labour would have benefited from some better strategic planning and the senior MPs were almost all in dire need of some presentation coaching. My heart sank every time Corbyn (or several others) was faced with a difficult question and almost always muffed it, or fell back on waffle. I can't believe they weren't better briefed on some of these really obvious questions.
I thought the manifesto was superb, but I also thought it was a huge error of judgement to only reveal the key features at the 11th hour. Nothing had time to sink in before Johnson and his tame media (many of whom are his personal friends) was able to drag the narrative back to Brexit with no time at all for Labour to shift the focus. As for the pledges promising everything to everyone, one of the points that needed to sink in in particular was that the spending was modest and similar to the levels of public spending and investment across Europe. The UK is unusual in Western Europe in that we have an essentially socialist welfare system funded on a very low proportion of GDP. Far more of our GDP is directed either by various tax incentives, or by very high salaries and dividends etc. to the wealthy which has created a huge wealth gap that is more akin to the US or Russia.